In Part I of this post, [Dr. Thomas Carey] offered reflections on the discussion paper Building a Modern 21st Century Workforce prepared for Fall 2024 consultations led by the Government of Canada’s Minister of Workplace Development. Those reflections were based on our experiences in the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, fostering collaborations with workplace and higher education partners to advance employee-led innovation in Canada.
This follow-up post complements those previous reflections with insights specific to another emerging focal point for our current collaborations within Canada and beyond: Developing a distinctive role for Canada in Workplace Innovation Skills for Industry 5.0.
In this three-part post, [Dr. Thomas Carey offers his] reflections on the discussion paper Building a Modern 21st Century Workforce prepared for Fall 2024 consultations led by the Government of Canada’s Minister of Workplace Development. These reflections are based on experiences by our team within the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, around our mission to foster collaborations with workplace and higher education partners to advance employee-led innovation in Canadian workplaces.
In this post, Rob Danisch, Communication Studies Professor at the University of Waterloo, reflects on the importance of focusing on teaching creative and critical thinking skills to help students become innovation catalysts …
In my case, I’m a Professor of Communication Studies. This means that my classes focus on the kinds of communication practices that can foster or catalyze innovation. It’s not music we are learning to play, at least not necessarily; we are learning an embodied knowledge about our everyday habits of interaction. And I’ve long wanted to teach the embodied communication practices most helpful for creating a culture of learning and catalyzing innovation.
Our WINCan team was delighted to be invited to present our current work at the October conference of the EU’s Workplace Innovation Network on The Future of Work. The focus of the presentation was our recent progress on establishing a sustainable Professional Community for Workplace Innovation Catalysts in the Windsor-Essex region, including the larger plan to integrate workplace innovation as a key enabling element in the region’s Innovation Ecosystem.
In Part I of this post, we provided an overview of a WINCan project with our summer research intern – Kyla, an undergrad in the Integrated Sciences program at McMaster University. The aim was to assess the feasibility of creating case stories to illustrate workplace innovation activities that would be of specific interest to Science students. The previous post discusses source material for illustrative case stories for two of the innovation activities – Job Crafting and Innovation Adaptation – in our adaptable learning resources for Understanding and Applying Workplace Innovation.
We follow up in this post with illustrative case story sources for Design Thinking and Intrapreneurship. We also describe a potential practice case story with which students could engage as a test of their understanding, based on a Design Thinking experiment to improve a biochemistry lab course at McMaster.
While teaching and learning for Entrepreneurship capability is an established activity in postsecondary education, teaching and learning for capability in employee-led Workplace Innovation is a more recent development. Initiatives to develop workplace innovation capability in postsecondary education reflect growing recognition that “innovation and entrepreneurship are not only distinct concepts, but they also play out in postsecondary institutional contexts in different ways” [Selznick 2019].
In previous posts, we outlined our prototype workplace innovation Ladder of Professional Development Opportunities and provided illustrations from the work domain of Accountancy for the first two opportunities (Job Crafting and Innovation Adaptation), along with a demonstration of how innovative developments in Accountancy practice have opened up new opportunities for employee-led Workplace Innovation by accountants.
In this post we follow up with examples from the specific Accountancy subfield of Auditing, to illustrate the dual goals of employee-led Workplace Innovation (improving organizational effectiveness and quality of work life), adaptation of innovative accounting practices from sources outside the firm, and the development of new innovator roles for accountants in Audit.
We were delighted to see the announcement of “a new takeoff for EUWIN”, including a relaunch of the EUWIN Bulletin and a revitalized Knowledge Bank. In this post, we’ve highlighted a few of their new directions, so that you can see the topics and issues being explored.
In this post in the Australian daily higher education news update, Senior Lecturer for Queensland University’s Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Dr. Deanne Gannaway urges Australia’s post-secondary educators to reconsider the value of Humanities and Social Science (HASS) Education. Deanne is an Associate Professor in the University of Queensland's Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation and leads their partnership with WINCan.
We hear on a regular basis from our workplace partners that our graduates will need to adapt to Jobs of the Future by working with knowledge that doesn’t yet exist, using knowledge practices and formats that don’t yet exist, in work roles and structures that don’t yet exist. How can we help learners to develop the capabilities needed in order to engage with, make adaptations to and even lead the way on the changes that we can’t yet anticipate?
In this post, Galen MacLusky, Consulting Director of the Tamarack Institute’s Community Innovation Idea Area links to his research note on Community Innovation Trends. If you're not familiar with the Community Innovation notion, it refers to a particular form of social innovation that is place-based – within the specific geography of a community.
WINCan workplace partner Galen MacLusky, Director of Community Innovation for the Tamarack Institute, discusses how taking the time to explore why you want to innovate can help you expose potential pitfalls that otherwise may have been missed. Galen describes three different community innovation drivers and the various risks that accompany each. With each risk, Galen provides some common questions that can help you uncover where a focus on innovation may take you away from your goals. (originally posted this month on the Tamarack Institute website).
In this post we highlight sample resources we discovered that showed promise in helping us address these goals. These came from multiple research areas, which we characterized under the following headings:
Indigenous Ways of Knowing and “Indigenous-Minded Innovation” as a Social Process
Research evidence on Indigenous Entrepreneurship
Research evidence on innovation within specific indigenous communities
Exemplary practices for incorporating Indigenous Ways of Knowing into higher ed programs
